One Fat Nation

A new report is out and it’s not pretty. It shows just how “fat” this nation has become. In 1995, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent. Now, all but one- Colorado- does. Here is a snip-it of the report from Fox News. Or watch this Fox News video “The State of Obesity”.

An annual obesity report by two public health groups looked for the first time at state-by-state statistics over the last two decades. The state that has the lowest obesity rate now — Colorado, with 19.8 percent of adults considered obese — would have had the highest rate in 1995.

“When you look at it year by year, the changes are incremental,” says Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health, which writes the annual report with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “When you look at it by a generation you see how we got into this problem.”

The study, based on 2010 data, says a dozen states top 30 percent obesity, most of them in the South. Mississippi topped the list for the seventh year in a row, with Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee and Louisiana close behind. Just five years ago, in 2006, Mississippi was the only state above 30 percent.

Go to the CDC website and watch the map below “in motion”. It shows, year-by-year, how our country’s obesity rate has crept from “blue” (low obesity rates) to “red” (high obesity rates). This is a great visual tool in order to see just how quickly we have become overweight.